When is a wandering mind unhappy? The role of thought valence.

The current research represents one of the first attempts to investigate how various thought qualities that naturally fluctuate across attention states (i.e., mind wandering vs.

Evidence-based scientific thinking and decision-making in everyday life.

In today's knowledge economy, it is critical to make decisions based on high-quality evidence. Science-related decision-making is thought to rely on a complex interplay of reasoning skills, cognitive styles, attitudes, and motivations toward information. By investigating the relationship between individual differences and behaviors related to evidence-based decision-making, our aim was to better understand how adults engage with scientific information in everyday life.

Standing out: an atypical salience account of creativity.

Creativity often entails gaining a novel perspective, yet it remains uncertain how this is accomplished. Atypical salience processing may foster creative thinking by prioritizing putatively irrelevant information, thereby broadening the material accessible for idea generation and inhibiting attentional fixedness; in essence, motivating creative individuals to incorporate information that others overlook.

Why creatives don't find the oddball odd: Neural and psychological evidence for atypical salience processing.

Creativity has previously been linked with various attentional phenomena, including unfocused or broad attention. Although this has typically been interpreted through an executive functioning framework, such phenomena may also arise from atypical incentive salience processing. Across two studies, we examine this hypothesis both neurally and psychologically.

Hierarchical consciousness: the Nested Observer Windows model.

Foremost in our experience is the intuition that we possess a unified conscious experience. However, many observations run counter to this intuition: we experience paralyzing indecision when faced with two appealing behavioral choices, we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and the content of our thought is often characterized by an internal debate. Here, we propose the Nested Observer Windows (NOW) Model, a framework for hierarchical consciousness wherein information processed across many spatiotemporal scales of the brain feeds into subjective experience.

How is GPS used? Understanding navigation system use and its relation to spatial ability.

Given how commonly GPS is now used in everyday navigation, it is surprising how little research has been dedicated to investigating variations in its use and how such variations may relate to navigation ability. The present study investigated general GPS dependence, how people report using GPS in various navigational scenarios, and the relationship between these measures and spatial abilities (assessed by self-report measures and the ability to learn the layout of a novel environment). GPS dependence is an individual's perceived need to use GPS in navigation, and GPS usage is the frequency with which they report using different functions of GPS.

High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioural findings is achievable.

Failures to replicate evidence of new discoveries have forced scientists to ask whether this unreliability is due to suboptimal implementation of methods or whether presumptively optimal methods are not, in fact, optimal. This paper reports an investigation by four coordinated laboratories of the prospective replicability of 16 novel experimental findings using rigour-enhancing practices: confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration and methodological transparency. In contrast to past systematic replication efforts that reported replication rates averaging 50%, replication attempts here produced the expected effects with significance testing (P < 0.

What I didn't grow up with is dangerous: personal experience with a new technology or societal change reduces the belief that it corrupts youth.

Introduction: Throughout history, technological and societal changes consistently receive suspicion. Their influences appear damaging, corrupting, and potential precursors to societal downfall, with today's youth often portrayed as the primary victims. This study aims to explore an underlying reason for these perceptions and to investigate why society frequently perceives technological and societal transitions as detrimental to the younger generation.

Insight and the selection of ideas.

Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity's most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from the stream of consciousness by capturing attention and eliciting a sense of intuitive confidence permitting fast action under uncertainty. The mechanisms underlying this Eureka heuristic are explained within an active inference framework.

Do Obligations Follow the Mind or Body?

Do you persist as the same person over time because you keep the same mind or because you keep the same body? Philosophers have long investigated this question of personal identity with thought experiments. Cognitive scientists have joined this tradition by assessing lay intuitions about those cases. Much of this work has focused on judgments of identity continuity.

Moral contamination: Perceptions of good (but not bad) deeds depend on the ethical history of the actor.

In the majority of moral decision-making research, we are asked to consider the action of someone we know little about-an anonymous actor. This is inconsistent with our everyday judgments of the actions of others. Here we test the novel prediction of whether actions are considered as comparably virtuous or malignant when performed by a good person, an immoral person, or the standard anonymous actor.

Who Denigrates Today's Youth?: The Role of Age, Implicit Theories, and Sharing the Same Negative Trait.

Adults perceive the youth of the present as being worse than from when they were young. This phenomenon has been shown to be a product of a memory bias, adults are unable to accurately recall what children were like in the past so they impose their current selves onto their memories. In two studies using American adults ( = 2,764), we seek to connect this finding to age, implicit theories of change, and extend the beliefs in the decline of the youth to new domains.

Manipulating Belief in Free Will and Its Downstream Consequences: A Meta-Analysis.

Ever since some scientists and popular media put forward the idea that free will is an illusion, the question has risen what would happen if people stopped believing in free will. Psychological research has investigated this question by testing the consequences of experimentally weakening people's free will beliefs. The results of these investigations have been mixed, with successful experiments and unsuccessful replications.

Where's My Consciousness-Ometer? How to Test for the Presence and Complexity of Consciousness.

Tools and tests for measuring the presence and complexity of consciousness are becoming available, but there is no established theoretical approach for what these tools are measuring. This article examines several categories of tests for making reasonable inferences about the presence and complexity of consciousness (defined as the capacity for phenomenal/subjective experience) and also suggests ways in which different theories of consciousness may be empirically distinguished. We label the various ways to measure consciousness the (MCC) and include three subcategories in our taxonomy: (a) neural correlates of consciousness, (b) behavioral correlates of consciousness, and (c) creative correlates of consciousness.

Mind-Wandering and Childhood ADHD: Experimental Manipulations across Laboratory and Naturalistic Settings.

The conceptual overlap between mind-wandering and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related impairments is considerable, yet little experimental research examining this overlap among children is available. The current study aims to experimentally manipulate mind-wandering among children with and without ADHD and examine effects on task performance. Participants were 59 children with ADHD and 55 age-matched controls.

A relationship that makes life worth-living: levels of value orientation explain differences in meaning and life satisfaction.

When people talk about their values they refer to what is meaningful to them. Although meaning is associated with life satisfaction, previous studies report inconsistent results regarding the association of values and well-being. A cross-sectional study ( = 276) addresses the research question, do values influence experiences of meaning and subjective evaluations of life satisfaction? To assess whether providing a definition of "meaningful" is necessary when employing meaning measures, we assigned participants to condition where some provided their definition and others read a definition of "meaningful".

Irrelevant insights make worldviews ring true.

Our basic beliefs about reality can be impossible to prove and yet we can feel a strong intuitive conviction about them, as exemplified by insights that imbue an idea with immediate certainty. Here we presented participants with worldview beliefs such as "people's core qualities are fixed" and simultaneously elicited an aha moment. In the first experiment (N = 3000, which included a direct replication), participants rated worldview beliefs as truer when they solved anagrams and also experienced aha moments.

LSD and creativity: Increased novelty and symbolic thinking, decreased utility and convergent thinking.

Background: Controversy surrounds psychedelics and their potential to boost creativity. To date, psychedelic studies lack a uniform conceptualization of creativity and methodologically rigorous designs.

Aims: This study aimed at addressing previous issues by examining the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on creativity using multimodal tasks and multidimensional approaches.

Thought dynamics under task demands: Evaluating the influence of task difficulty on unconstrained thought.

As research on mind wandering has accelerated, the construct's defining features have expanded and researchers have begun to examine different dimensions of mind wandering. Recently, Christoff and colleagues have argued for the importance of investigating a hitherto neglected variety of mind wandering: "unconstrained thought," or, thought that is relatively unguided by executive-control processes. To date, with only a few studies investigating unconstrained thought, little is known about this intriguing type of mind wandering.

Filthy Animals: Integrating the Behavioral Immune System and Disgust into a Model of Prophylactic Dehumanization.

Unlabelled: The behavioral immune system (BIS) is an evolved psychological mechanism that motivates prophylactic avoidance of disease vectors by eliciting disgust. When felt toward social groups, disgust can dampen empathy and promote dehumanization. Therefore, we investigated whether the BIS facilitates the dehumanization of groups associated with disease by inspiring disgust toward them.

Getting a grip on insight: real-time and embodied Aha experiences predict correct solutions.

Insight experiences are sudden, persuasive, and can accompany valuable new ideas in science and art. In this preregistered experiment, we aim to validate a novel visceral and continuous measure of insight problem solving and to test whether and embodied feelings of insight can predict correct solutions. We report several findings.

The neural correlates of ongoing conscious thought.

A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly accounts for both the heterogeneity of the experience and context dependence of patterns of ongoing thought.

Attention need not always apply: Mind wandering impedes explicit but not implicit sequence learning.

According to the attentional resources account, mind wandering (or "task-unrelated thought") is thought to compete with a focal task for attentional resources. Here, we tested two key predictions of this account: First, that mind wandering should not interfere with performance on a task that does not require attentional resources; second, that as task requirements become automatized, performance should improve and depth of mind wandering should increase. Here, we used a serial reaction time task with implicit- and explicit-learning groups to test these predictions.